Join the Movement!


Give a small gift today. Strengthen fitness and nutrition by supporting family participation in physical activities and healthy eating.

Harvard researchers found that for every 1 hour of exercise, you can add 2 hours to life.


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Parent Engagement in School Health
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Adolescent and School Health

Fact Sheets on Promoting Parent Engagement in School Health

Project Appleseed Engagement Tools

Staff Development Program for Engaging Parents in School Health



Cover for Promoting Parent Engagement in School Health: A Facilitator's Guide for Staff Development

Staff development is critical to helping school staff strengthen their abilities to involve parents. This program is designed to help school staff ―

  • Generate enthusiasm and interest in improving parent engagement in school health
  • Understand the essential aspects of parent engagement, including how to positively connect with parents, engage parents in meaningful school health activities, and address challenges of engaging parents in school health activities
  • Share information with other staff members not attending the program
  • Initiate steps to implement a parent engagement action plan

This guide provides the step-by-step procedures, activities and exercises, handout materials, resources, and PowerPoint® presentation (with facilitator narrative and notes) needed to implement this staff development program. In addition, an e-mail template to use in promoting the availability of this program to school staff—and inviting them to participate—is included.




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Eat Your Way To An A?

 The Link Between Student Nutrition And Student Achievement
We all understand that eating right is an important aspect of keeping our children physically healthy, but many parents do not know that proper nutrition is strongly linked with academic achievement. Even fewer people know that poor nutrition is not only a problem for impoverished families – children of all socioeconomic levels can suffer from lower student achievement due to nutritional problems at home.
 


How Important Is Sleep To School Success?
A person needs eight hours of sleep to stay healthy and alert, right? Wrong. While adults can thrive on eight hours of sleep per night, children require much more time snoozing in order to accommodate their developing minds and bodies. Medical professionals suggest that children aged 7-12 sleep ten or eleven hours per night while teens aged 13-18 get nine to ten hours of sleep per night. Unfortunately, The National Sleep Foundations says that only 5 percent of high school students get eight hours of rest a night and all school students sleep an hour less at night then their parents did as children.  




Soccer. Piano lessons. Dance classes. Boy Scouts. The school play. The vast majority of parents agree that these after-school activities enrich their children’s lives, but recent research shows that the benefits of high quality, structured extracurricular activities go far beyond the rewards of the activities themselves. The Harvard Family Research Project recently released research that once again confirmed that out-of-school time activities increase academic achievement, improve classroom conduct, and nurture lifelong work habits.

 

USDA nutrition guidelines on 'My Plate'


A huge improvement over the baffling MyPyramid icon that it replaces, MyPlate is as easy as pie to understand; its designers smartly saved the fine print about how to actually fill the wedge-shaped spots on the plate for the Web site, ChooseMyPlate.gov. MyPlate, like the Food Pyramids before it, is meant to convey the key messages of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in a simple, consumer-friendly fashion.